Food meets art in San Jose Museum’s ‘Around the Table’

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Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik’s fragrant wallpaper-mural, “To Curry Favor,” 2011, is one of the powerful exhibits at the San Jose Museum of Art’s upcoming “Around the Table” show. The curry powder comes from Oakland’s Oasis Food Market and is applied to the wall with adhesive in this site-specific installation. (Image courtesy of the artist and the San Jose Museum of Art)

The social, economic and political role of food isn’t generally the kind of meaty conversation topic that comes up over lunch — which may be why creating a space to reflect on the nutritional, emotional and even spiritual aspects of food is all the more intriguing.

That’s the thinking behind “Around the Table: Food, Creativity, Community,” an ambitious new three-part exhibit that kicks off Friday at the San Jose Museum of Art.

“In some ways, we’re more connected to food than we have been,” senior interim curator Susan Leask says, “and in some ways so disconnected.”

With work by visual artists from the Bay Area and beyond, the exhibit asks viewers to see, smell, taste and reflect via installations that include a massive roti labyrinth, a fragrant curry mural and a living tree grafted with 40 varieties of fruit. The exhibit is accompanied by a smorgasbord of programming that includes performances, documentary film screenings, farm tours, fruit gleaning and even a seed library in the museum’s cafe.

It’s also fertile creative ground for visual artists such as Mumbai-based Jitish Kallat, whose solo installation “Jitish Kallat: Epilogue” is on view through April 20 in the museum’s South Gallery. A soulful homage to the artist’s deceased father, the piece is made up of 735 photographs of roti — an Indian flatbread — shaped to resemble the 22,500 moons that hung in the night sky during his father’s lifetime.

In “Epilogue,” food is more than an artistic medium. It connects time, abundance and scarcity, the finitude of life and the overlaying of the celestial with the everyday, Kallat said via email.

“Roti is the staple bread in India, and while it has many personal associations for me with my father, it morphs with the lunar form to interlace the daily meal and the moon as recurrent units of life’s measurement,” Kallat said.

The exhibit organizers chose “Epilogue” as a preface to the exhibit, because it’s an especially contemplative and thought-provoking piece. “I think it’s a nice, quiet way to start thinking about what in your family or your life are the rituals you’ve performed and how food fits into that,” Leask says.

The museum’s larger “second course,” which opens Nov. 9, showcases 29 contemporary artists, a list that includes Berkeley’s Susan O’Malley, who will conduct interactions with visitors based on interviews conducted with farmers, shop owners and chefs. O’Malley plans to dish up “morsels” of food that relate to the stories she’s heard.

“I’m really interested in creating a place where people can slow down and perhaps appreciate this bit of food,” she says. “It’s about eating something small and being more mindful of this act that we do every day — individually and sometimes with the community.”

Other works on display in November include Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik’s fragrant curry powder wallpaper, a mural that addresses food and racial stereotypes; meals created by Karla Diaz, based on recipes written by state prisoners, who use ingredients available in commissaries in an attempt to re-create dishes they can no longer access; and Sam Van Aken’s “Tree of 40 Fruits,” a tribute to perseverance and diversity, embodied by a living plum tree grafted with 40 different types of stone fruit.

If you go

What: “Around the Table: Food, Creativity, Community,” a three-part exhibit that includes performances and special events.When: “Jitish Kallat: Epilogue,” opens Friday, “Around the Table” begins Nov. 9 and “Talk Around the Table” launches Dec. 19. Exhibits are on view until April 20. Open 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Where: San Jose Museum of Art, 110 S. Market St. Tickets: $5-$8, www.sjmusart.org